Thursday 22 April 2010

More government mugs on drugs

Ah well, even as the UK and Manx governments introduce a pointless ban on one ‘legal high’, the market has moved on (see, for example http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/apr/18/drug-replace-ban-mephedrone).
For the benefit of public sector drones, I think you’ll find that’s called ‘market research’. Businesses in the real world do it all the time. What’s known in marketing as ‘SWOT analysis’ (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats). Basic FE college stuff for business studies kiddies, but harder than rocket science, apparently, for bumbling public sector and ‘third sector’ parasites who live off the taxes of others.
There’s a really, really simple point here which the clueless anti-drug industry is missing. Drug dealers weren’t flogging legal highs, innovative and quite legal small businesses were.
The folk behind such initiatives are well used to thinking on their feet, for example to avoid being overtaxed or burdened with long term liabilities. They spot new trends and jump on while they’re rising, they jump off well before flat-footed government employees create obstacles or the market in last year’s novelty item collapses. These are not thugs sleeping with a sawn-off beside the bed to see off competitors; they’re embryonic Richard Bransons.
Which makes it all the funnier to see our local drug czars continuing to pimp the fundie product of Christofascist ‘family values’ cults (see
http://www.gov.im/lib/news/education/freedrugandalcoh.xml) under the pretence of ‘educating parents’.
Can I just make another simple observation on this?
In my entire experience of life - in numerous UK inner cities - I have never heard of a drug dealer brazen enough to claim his product offered life after death. And I have never heard of a junkie dumb enough to believe it.
Evangelical Christianity? Now THAT is a drug industry that needs some serious investigation if civil servants and small town politicians need a point to their lives. A scam run by the totally unscrupulous, patronised by the totally clueless.
And while we’re looking at ‘government mugs on drugs’, try
http://www.devilskitchen.me.uk/2010/04/absolute-non-surprise-of-week.html for some views from the UK libertarian community.
Even wilder is http://www.cnbc.com/id/36267220/ , where I saw something I wouldn’t believe possible. A Texan Republican talking sense about drug issues.

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